A brief history of Norton Internet Security

What is Norton Internet Security?

Norton Internet Security is one of the top Norton products giving you protection from viruses, spyware, Trojans, worms, rootkits, botnets, spam and phishing. It also includes a Firewall, parental controls and intelligent scanning to save memory and capacity of your PC.

Who uses it?

Norton internet security and Antivirus hold a combined market share of 61 per cent, and they have been keeping computers safe for almost a decade now

The first edition (1.0) released in January 2000, was the first Symantec product that moved beyond strictly anti-virus and content control. It featured banner-ad control and cookie removal, while a Family Edition added parental controls.

Version 2.5 added Intrusion Detection to protect computers against attacks and the firewall could put the computer in stealth mode.  Version 5.0 released in 2002 bundled together all the family control, and next year an anti spam program was added.

What happened next?

By 2005 Norton had to fight the growth of spyware, and anti-spyware and keystroke logging technology was introduced, something which could lead to lengthy scan times and the slowing down of some computers.

By 2008 Norton had beaten these problems by introducing Norton Insight which only scanned at risk files, and a reduced memory footprint.  Norton Pulse updates were introduced to keep software up to date with the most recent virus threats.

Where are we now?

The latest version, Internet Security 2010, features Project Quorum, which looks at the reputation of the software, decided by thousands of online contributions by Norton subscribers, to decide whether something is malware.